CITSEE Report Summary

Final Report Summary - CITSEE (The Europeanisation of Citizenship in the Successor States of the Former Yugoslavia)

The ERC project led by Professor Jo Shaw at the University of Edinburgh entitled The Europeanisation of Citizenship in the Successor States of the Former Yugoslavia (CITSEE) set out to map and to analyse the citizenship regimes of the seven new states of South East Europe to be found where once there was just the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), until it began to break up in 1991. CITSEE’s work proceeded against the backdrop of ongoing political tensions in the region which continue even now, as well as the slow progress of European integration, which saw Croatia (2013) alone amongst the successor states becoming a Member State of the European Union, alongside Slovenia, which had joined in 2004. CITSEE was concerned with multiple processes of state break-up and re-establishment which culminated in the separation of Serbia and Montenegro (2008), and the unilateral declaration of independence of Kosovo (2008), as well as the impact of Europeanisation and enlargement processes. It used a qualitative comparative methodology rooted in socio-legal and socio-political studies of constitutions and constitutional law. It drew on sources within national law, European law, and international law, especially international human rights law. Preliminary work by the PI and the senior researcher (Dr Igor Štiks) clarified the concept of citizenship regime with which the research team worked throughout the project. A website was established to disseminate the most important raw research findings via 36 open access working papers, which were downloaded more than 6000 times in total during the course of the project.

In a first phase of research, CITSEE made use of a standardised research instrument for mapping the emergence, evolution, context and content of national citizenship regimes which had been developed by the EUDO Citizenship Observatory at the European University Institute (www.eudo-citizenship.eu), of which the PI is a co-Director. The use of this instrument has facilitated comparisons not just between the CITSEE states, but also with other European states covered in the EUDO Observatory. 12 working papers were producing mapping the citizenship regimes and putting them in political and constitutional context. Country case study papers distilling the most important issues related to the citizenship regimes were published, with an introduction, as a special issue of the leading subject-area journal Citizenship Studies in 2012, and translated into one of the local languages (Serbian).

The second phase of research took this work as a baseline and developed a series of comparative studies focused on key issues such as ethnic selection, minority statuses, gender issues, territoriality, and the governance of citizenship in a multi-level constitutional context. Working papers and three journal special issues have been produced as a result of this work in leading sectoral journals. Alongside this second phase, the PI and the senior researcher worked on their own monographs emerging from the project, which will be published in 2016 (Cambridge University Press) and 2015 (Bloomsbury) respectively. Another CITSEE research fellows who had moved to a postdoctoral position at another university also produced a monograph based on CITSEE research in 2015 (Ashgate).

CITSEE’s dissemination strategy was wide-ranging. It included the website mentioned above (www.citsee.ed.ac.uk), a web magazine (www.citsee.eu) aimed at making research accessible to wider society, short films and animations (viewed more than 100k times during the lifetime of the project), as well as standard outputs in the form of journal articles, special issues, chapters and books.